Today I learned… in code

A lot happens between "Hello World" and "Supreme Master Programmer". Here, we share little discoveries made along the way. The more frustrating something was, the more likely it is to end up here on this site!

The rest of this post is about the app itself (not its code). If you’re hoping for some code walkthroughs, stay tuned – I’ll be writing a few in the next month or two before I move onto my next side project.

App inspiration

I started OSU’s online CS degree program Fall 2016, and I am so grateful for the opportunity the school has given me to receive a formal CS education.

Ever since I applied to the program I’ve been an avid reader of the OSU CS subreddit. I was always looking for info on my next class – survival tips, strategies, what to study, etc. The course survey (linked in the sidebar) contains years of useful student data but at 300+ entries, it was becoming difficult to browse or parse on a macro level (ie: there was no way to look at it and determine how time-consuming on average a particular class might be).

I had the idea for a simple web app that would take the Google spreadsheet data and reorganize it by course, listing all the tips (with timestamps) and aggregating the time spent and difficulty data into a couple of easy-to-read pie charts. I knew other people would find this useful, too, so I planned to make it publicly and freely available once it was presentable. (From this experience I also wanted a finished, portfolio-worthy app that I might show to a potential employer.)

I started the project in the summer of 2017, worked on it bit by bit whenever I wasn’t swamped with classwork (or my full-time job, or my baby who was 9-13 months old while I worked on this, or the cross-country move I did in August). It’s definitely a testament of what you can build even if you don’t have loads of contiguous free time, as long as you are consistent and keep going.

Browse the code

If you want to browse the app’s progress (and see some of the mistakes I made along the way) you can browse the GitHub repo for it here. I tried to leave concise comments explaining what I was doing, in hopes that other students and beginning web devs would find it helpful.

I plan to write a few blog posts dedicated to different sections of the app’s code. I love “here’s an app I built and how I built it” type posts myself and owe a lot of my own knowledge to them, so I’ll try to give back a few contributions of my own.

Why I chose AngularJS

I know everyone’s got the hots for React these days but I had just come off of 2 years of working in Ember and wanted to return to my ancestral headwaters for a bit and build something in the framework I got my start in. I wanted to see if all my “I liked how that worked in Angular better” feelings towards Ember were actually accurate or just some rose-colored tinting of history (as it turns out, I really do prefer Angular to Ember :P)

I don’t know if I’d pick it again, though. The world has largely moved on from AngularJS (to Angular 2 and beyond, and React), but there’s still a ton of helpful blog posts and Stack Overflow questions about every imaginable Angular topic (way more than Ember has, that’s for sure) so for that reason, I think it’s still a good, established choice if you’re new to web development frameworks and want to try something.

Thanks to contributors

Special thanks goes to Yong Joseph Bakos for his pull requests after the project launched – cleaning up some cruft in the codebase, improving tests, documentation, etc.

Special thanks also goes to Jonathan Burley for helping unstick me at some critical points in development, like when I needed help customizing the canvas legends in a way that wasn’t documented and when Heroku was being a pain.

I feel like I always learn so much from even the briefest encounters with other developers, so I am grateful for the help I received along the way.